shall make my considerations. i listened to what he has to say carefully, but i did not expect the president to answer my request. i simply put the consideration before him. >> we are out of this time, but i will leave it on one final thought. is there hope that within the next few bunts the secretary of state, the president, someone can really break through and help the israelis and palestinians achieve a peace agreement? >> i will not answer you seriously. it is a possibility, not a certainty. i would not exclude it. i cannot say it was already achieved, because all of us, including the palestinians and israelis, we know that to move ahead calls for taking risks.

and people do not feel easy with taking risks. it is not a game. . .

then they can consider freely what is good for egypt. and i told president of the palestinian people and telling our own people, let's take it out. let's bring an end to the conflict. i think all of them are people who all realize the situation and they have to make a choice between two risky situations. one is to make the necessary concessions in order to bring an end to the conflict.

and the other, if it won't be done, the conflict may call on the final results of the revolt of the young generation. i don't join in the idea so -- that this is a clash of civilizations. i think it is a clash of generations. i think there is a young generation that wants to enter a new age of freedom. of honesty, and maybe even different from the old concept that democracy is not just free expression but self-expression. they're educated youngsters. they went to the?

my answer, yes. is the problem just financial? no. the problem is to understand that today there is no longer a national economy but global economy. that the way to introduce growth in the economy is not just by continuing the traditional dependence on the land and cultivating the land but by hanging on the offers of science and technology. and i think we have to enable them. we have to free them from the old goals and old prejudices where people prefer to remember rather than to think. but when they remember, they forget a lot of things. they remember only the satisfy fid of the past. what they don't forget are prejudices. it's very hard to get rid of prejudices but we have to. we are facing a new era, a new

world that doesn't hang up on the land but hangs upon the science. science doesn't have borders. science cannot be achieved by armies. cannot be controlled by police. it is open and free for all. the meaning of democracy today is not just the right to be equal but to have the equal right to be different. and we have to enable remember there are people who join in the new world. only the new world can help them to escape the traditional. >> would it be smart for the president of the united states to do what jimmy carter did, invite the israelis and the palestinians to camp david and negotiate a peace agreement? >> the president tried to do it and -- >> which president? >> obama. he met with the israeli prime

minister and the palestinian president. i think the president is ready to do it. but wants to make sure that in the wake of such a meeting there will be negotiations. and if the parties will agree for negotiations in spite of the differences, when president carter invited prime minister bagen and mr. sad at mr. sad dat was an exceptional statesman. he was the only arab leader to think who says i am ready to open jerusalem, i am ready to make peace. would we have more is a dats, then the president would have more. but even now i think the president is ready to make the necessary steps provided that it won't be just a show.

that in the wake of the meeting, there will be negotiations between the two parties. he doesn't want to impose a solution. he really thinks like all of us that the solution must result from an agreement of common positions and that's one of the reasons why i respect the president. i believe he is trying to do the right thing. and not create solutions and not to create something which is imaginary. so it's a different situation because there are different parties. and it's not the loss lost hope. neither is it a sure prospect. it's a possibility and we have to work very hard and very serious to make this possibility into a reality. and that should be the task of

all of us. >> on that note, mr. president, thank you very much on behalf of all of us. good luck to you. good luck to all the israeli people. to the palestinians. and to the entire region. thank you. [applause] >> next, a discussion on economic and social divisions in white america. after that, rolling stone executive editor eric baits on their special report concerning u.s. soldiers in afghanistan. then the weekly addresses by president obama and house budget committee chairman paul ryan. >> on "newsmakers," republican national committee chairman rinse prebust looks at campaign 2012, the candidate field, the primaries, issues and fund

raising. "newsmakers" sunday at 10:00 and 6:00 on c-span. follow c-span on twitter. it's the fastest way to get programming and schedule updates as well as links to events we've covered. you can also tweet questions directly to our guests. join the viewers who already follow our twitter feeds. author and political scientists said monday that over the last half century america has developed not only a new lower class but a new upper class. he said these developments are not linked to america's evolving ethnic composition but to the erosion of american exceptionalism. the autsdz deer scribes the evidence for these claims in terms of america's nonlatino white population from 1960 to 2010.

it's about 90 minutes. despite the title of this eevepping's lecture, those expecting to hear a discourse on race are not going to hear it. in fact, this is a lecture about culture and increasing separation between social classes in america in a way that has very little to do with race. instead, it exposes a ruthless class sorting process that our society has developed with frightening results for those of us who join me in wanting america to truly be one nation. charles murray is the wh brady scholar here at aei and has been here since 1990.

he is the author of many books that have effectively become cult classics. like in pursuit of happiness, human accomplishment, and real education. charles has had an extraordinary impact on a life of many, many scholars. those of you who know me personally know that he has had a major impact on my own career as a scholar. for a long time i made my living as a professional horn player and in the mid 1990s i happen to cross charles' work by pure chance. i found that his style of analysis opened up a huge vissa of idea for me making me understand that the lirkle beauty that i usually thought of in music can happen in social science. this sent me back to graduate school and ultimately a career in public policy leading to the american enterprise institute itself. years later after all of this charles and i became friends and i told him he had had a

hand in leading me out of the music business and to become a college professor. he actually seemed pained as if i had told him he had led me into delinquency of some kind. and about a year after that, aei was in search of a new president and had approached me about the position. i asked charles' advice and he strongly urged me to do it. that's advice for which i still hold him personally cauptable. my case is really only one of the many lives that charles has touched. he has been a intellectual model to a whole generation of scientists and tonight his fans will once again see why. following his remarks charles will take questions. and after that please join us in a reception outside. ladies and gentlemen, charles murray. [applause] >> thank you very much, arthur.

bradley lectures are usually reserved for work that is nicely pinned down. that's not the case tonight. since arthur read that manu script which was supposedly complete, i have added a new chapter and two important sections to two other chapters, rewritten extensively. and last friday i spent ten hours entering raw data on 614 zip codes and i haven't even started to analyze those yet. so tonight you are going to hear about a work in progress. this like all bradley lectures is on the record so i have to be willing to be quoted but i really don't want to be tonight. the thesis of this book is simple. over the last half century, the united states has developed a new lower class and a new upper class that are different in kind from anything america has ever known. the second contention of the book is that the divergence of america into these separate

classes if it continues will end what has made america america. to forestall misinterpretation, let me specify that this is not a book forecasting america's decline as a world power. we can continue to be wealthy and powerful even if we become the class society that i fear. and i don't also argue that america was ever a classless society. rich people have always lived in different parts of town than poor people. and have gone to different churches and have had somewhat different manners and morees. it is about the existence of classes that is new. but the emergence of class' that diverge on core behaviors and values. so what am i arguing? well, america has never been about maximizing wealth or international power. america has engaged in what i call and others have called the american project. it consists of the continuing

effort begun with the founding to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals and families to live their lives as they see fit, they can come together voluntarily to solve their joint problems. the policy based on that idea led to a civic culture that was seen as exceptional by all the world. that culture was so widely shared by americans that it amounted to a civil religion. the american way of life. a phrase that we actually don't hear much in more but used to be taken for granted. that culture is unraveling. in the book as in tonight's lecture i focus on what happened, not why. my primary goal is to get people to think about the ways in which america is coming apart at the seams, not seams of race or ethnicity but of class. and that leads to the title of tonight's lecture, the state of white america 1960 to 2020.

for decades, trends in american life have been presented in terms of race and ethnicity and the reference point has always been nonlatino whites. when i use the word whites from now on i'll always going to be referring to nonlatino whites. so when you read about the latest poverty statistics, what you read is here's the black poverty rate compared to the white poverty rate or here's the latino compared to the white poverty rates. there's nothing wrong with that. i wrote a book called losing ground that is filled with such comparisons. but in doing so, we lose sight of the reference point. and what i'm going to do is track what's been happening to that reference point. and so the book uses evidence based on whites. and my message is this. don't kid yourself that what we are looking at are trends that can be recommendied by eliminating racism or by restricting immigration.

i want to give my readers actually as few opportunities as possible to explain away in their own minds the trends that i describe. about three fourths of my presentation tonight focuses on the new lower class because i think it's better to give you the data that's involved in demonstrating that trend rather than to give you just a fragmentry presentation of the whole argument of the book. i will conclude with a few remarks about the situation regarding the new upper class but without much data attached. for america to work, as it was intended to work, meaning self-governing citizens running their own lives without hindrens from the government and without much help from the government is it enough to get the laws right or is something else required? among libertarians, this is a source of contention and more than a few of my libertarian coconspirators some of whom are here tonight think that the right constitutional limits on

government are enough and that the culture can take care of itself once those are in place. i'm very sympathetic to the notion that a limited government tends to foster virtue in the people but i think that the right laws are a necessary but not sufficient condition. in taking that position, i at least have really good company namely all of the founders and every observer of the american experiment who watched during the first half century. here's frances gruned a german that wrote about the same time as tookville. no government could be established as the same principle as that of the united states with a different code of more or less. it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions. change the domestic habits of the americans, their religious devotion, and their high respect for morality and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the constitution in order to vary

the whole form of their government. i could give you quoteations from every founder and from every european observer saying the same thing over and over. it was not just believed but taken for granted that certain virtues were required of a self-governing people. further more, there was lots of agreement about what those virttuss were. different people emphasized different things. but four of these were so completely universally understood that they can be considered as essential. two of them are virtues in themselves, industriousness and hons city, and two of them refer to institutions through which virtue is nurtured. marriage and religion. for convenience, i will refer to all four of them as the founding virtues. so how has america been doing on the founding virtues from 1960 to 2020? to track what's been going on i took two sections of white america. those percentages are based

upon the way that america is right now. in 2010, about 20% of whites ages 30 to 49 had colleges degrees and worked either in a managerial position or in one of the traditional professions by which i mean medicine, law, the sciences, architecture or academia or they were married to such a person. that's my end point. the people who in 2010 met the occupational and educational classical criteria for being in the upper middle class. i also selected the top 20% going back all the way to 1960 based on those with the 20% with the highest combination of education and occupation. but that means, since we have had so much expansion of college education, that in 1960 my top 20% consists of people who had only 42% with college degrees and only 35% of them were in these occupations. the choice of 30% to demar kate the bottom comes from this

observation. in 2010 about 30% of white americans ages 30 to 49 had no more than a high school diploma and worked in a skilled or unskilled blue collar job, a low skilled service job or a low skilled white collar job or were married to such a person. so those were people who fit the classic definition of the working class. and i went all the way back to 1960 selecting the bottom 30 percent of the data bases i was working with. the occupational distribution of the bottom 30% back in 1960 was pretty much the same as it is now. the educational distribution was radically different. 88% of that group had not even completed high school in 1960 compared to only 15% now. 59% of that group had completed only the eighth grade. by the way, the last couple of sentences illustrate a problem as i am presenting this material orally instead of on paper. it's going to get very

confusing if i say many mosh sentences such as 80% of the top 13%. so for convenience, i'm going to refer to the top 20% as the upper middle class and i'm going to refer to the bottom 30% of the working class. what we had back in 1960 is the upper middle class plus many from the middle class. and what we have with the bottom 30% from the 1960 was the very least able of the working class. if you think about it for a while, by the way, doing it this way stacks the evidence against -- excuse me. stacks the odds against my finding evidence for my thighs sis. something we can talk about. what about the percentage who belong to neither group? they were in the middle statistically as well as conceptually. note that i've been saying 30 to 49 all the time. why? it's another case of trying to

simplify the interpretation of the analysis much as possible. people in their 30s and 40's are almost always finished with school and very seldom have taken early retirement. they are in the prime of life. in short i am saying of them, look, if this is what we're seeing among whites ages 30 to 49, it's not going to get any better if we look at whites younger than that and whites older than that or people who aren't whites. ok. now to the trends. going to start with marriage. we're talking about data from the current population survey and from the 1960 census. in 1960, just about everybody was married. 88% of the upper middle class ages 30 to 49 compared to 83% of the working class. that's a five percentage point difference. it's trivial. what's happened by 2010, well, 83% of the upper middle class are still married. hardly any change at all. the percentage of the working class, ages 30 to 49 who are

married in 2010? 48%. that's a 35%age point gap that widend from 1960 to 2010. it amounts to a revolution in the separation of classes in this country. further more, the decline in the working class was continuing as of 2010 with only the very slightest evidence of flattening in that downward slope. note the discrepancy between what i've just said and our common impressions of what's going on with marriage. a very common compression that it's tupper middle class that's had problems with marriage. they're the ones who get divorced, they're the ones who take the mothers of the children and divorce them and get trophy wives. this is the group where you have career obsessed, we will educated young women who forego marriage altogether. and the common impression is gee in the working class traditional values are still

strong. that's four square opposite to the reality. the upper middle class, marriage is alive and well. it has collapsed in the working class. why is it a big deal? that fewer than half of working class whites ages 30 to 49 are not married? excuse me. are married? well, there's several reasons. one is that marriage civilizes men. married men, their incomes go up, their product tivity goes up. in a more general sense, adult males who are single are kind of a disheveled population. disheveled in a variety of ways, culturally and socially. and they clean up their acts after they get married with fairly good regularity. another reason is that single people are not good producers of social capital. they seldom coach little league teams and fund drives or take

the lead of getting a fourway stop sign where children play. a third reason is one that tookville saw worth quoting directly. i consider the domestic virtue of the americans, domestic virtue referring to married life in america, as the principle source of all their other qualities. he then goes on to enumerate those other qualities and concludes. in short, domestic virtue does more for the preservation of peace and good order than all the laws enacted for that purpose and is a better guarantee for the permanencey of the american government than any written instrument the constitution itself not exept. well, it's not just marriage that -- getting married that changed with regard to the institution of marriage. there's also the matter of the rise of births to single women. the percentage of children born to working class single women as of 1960 was around 6%.

by now, it is closing in on 50%. not talking about inner city blacks here, we're not talking about all the populations where you have single births that have been the topic of so much discussion over the last few decades. we're talking about nonhispanic whites. why is this important? because no matter what the outcome being examined, whether it is school dropout or emotional health or unemployment as adults or substance abuse or any other measure of how well or poorly children do in life on average the family structure that produce it is best outcomes for children are two biological children's who remain married. divorced parents are next, and way at the bottom are the outcomes for children who are born to never married women. all of these statements apply after controlling for the family socio economic status. they apply to unmarried women who are cohabitting with the father of the child as well as

to women live ago lone. i know of no other sense of social science findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists on the left as well as the right. and yet it seems imper missible for politician ors network news programs or any other kind of famous people to acknowledge them publicly. let's turn to industriousness. if just one trait can be said to be defining of the traditional american, that's probably it. frances grund again quote active occupation is not only the principle source of the americans' happiness and the foundation of their natural greatness but they're absolutely retched without it. acive occupation is the very soul of the american. her pursues it. when today the europeans say that americans live to work while europeans work to live, i don't think they realize how many of us americans on this

side of the atlantic say yeah, that's right. and then we feel sorry for those poor europeans. i'm going to focus on males here because the norms for women and work outside the home have changed so drassically over the last 50 years. for men they stayed pretty much the same. guys were supposed to work in 1960 and even today guys are supposed to work. a healthy male in his 30s and 40's who is not even trying to work needs a really good excuse. upper middle class males ages 30 to 49 have changed hardly at all. in 1960 one and a half percent of them were not in the labor force. in 2010,. for work class males, the same figure went from 5% in 1968 to 12% in 2008. i chose 2008 instead of 2010 because those numbers came before the recession. they are even higher now. among those in the working class, who have jobs, the proportion working fewer than

40 hours a week increasesed from 13 to 21%. from 1960 to 2008 again before the recession hit. the tee tier yor rations in incitrusness among white working class males have occurred in labor markets that were booming as well as in soft ones. honesty. i'm going to say very little about this one. if we're talking about felonies such as homicide robbery rape and burglary, it's a closed case. ever since criminology began as a discipline it has boon found that criminals who commit these are drawn overwhelmingly from the working class down. so when you contemplate the great increase in crime that occurred from 1960s into the early 1990s and the great increase in imprisonment that occurred from the 1970s into the 2020s you are looking into increases that have victimized the populations of working

class communities not change that is have victimized upper middle class communities. in fact one of the dirty little secrets about the last 50 years, because crime has been a huge topic in many of those decades, nothing much has changed in upper middle class suburbs. they haven't been dangerous places. they weren't then, they aren't now. hardly any of the founders was a devote crugs. frankly and everyson were openly deets but they're weren't the only people who were suspect in terms of their religious doctrine. washington and hamilton and madison were always very vague about their adherence to christian orthodoxy. and yet, they were all united in their belief that religion was essential to the health of the new nation. they made the case in similar terms. my colleague, michael novak was sum rised it this way. liberty is the object of the republic.

virtue needs liberty. and virtue among people is impossible without religion. they all believed it. and that includes thomas jefferson. they were making an empirical assertion which western europe is now putting to the test. namely, that moral codes lose their power eventually if they are not based on religion. the jury is still out on whether that is correct or not. but the last few decades have brought forth a very large technical literature about the effects of religion on maintaining civic life and the effects of religion on human flourishing. first, there is the role of organized religion in generating social capital. here's robert put nan in bowling alone, the landmark book on social capital and its decline. as a rule of thumb our evidence shows that nearly half of all memberships are church related, half of all personal fill

antspi is religious in character and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context. but it's not just the contributions of these religious based activity that is make religion so important to social capital. people who are religious also account for a large proportion of the secular social capital as put nan described both in bowling alone and in his recent book, american grace. apart from augusting social capital in general, sustaining a democratic citizenry. a vare right of studies have found that active involvement in church service serves as the kind of training center for important siic skills and all of these relationships hold true after controlling for various demographic and socio economic variables. beyond these kinds of claims you started to hear other evidence in the 1970s and 1980s that religious faith is impirkically associated with good things. social scientists who have no

personal interest in vindicating religion and in fact who themselves are usually secular, have been building a rigorous literature on these issues and it turns out that most of the claims are true. and that includes a wide variety of benefits for the socialization of children. so i suggest that whatever your personal religious beliefs may be, full disclosure i am an agnostic who occasionally attends quaker meetings with my wife, you are on weak evidentiary ground if you think that the health of the american project is not affected by secularization. the main story line here is that secularization has occurred across all social classes. the hard core definition is represented by people who forth rightly say that they have no religion. that number for all white americans ages 30 to 49 went from about 4% in 1972 the first year that the general social survey asked this question to 21% in 2010.

a very big increase. the changes had been larger in the working class than in the upper middle class but the even greater class difference has to do with what i will call de facto secularization. defacto secularization is when you tell the interviewer you have a religion but that you don't go to worship services more than once a year, if you combine hard core secularism and de facto secularism, the upper middle class went from 26% in 1972 to 42% in 2010. good sized increase. the parallel numbers for the working class, 35% to 61%. or to put it another way, a substantial majority of the upper middle class retains some meaningful form of religious involvement where as just as substantial a majority of the

working class does not. it's another case of data not matching popular impressions. the idea that we have especially those of us in an audience here in washington, d.c. is that it's among the intellectual elites, the upper middle class that the secularism has really taken hold. that's true. for intellectual elites in washington, d.c. and new york city and san francisco and overeducated people like us. it is not true of the upper middle class in atlanta, chicago, and des moines in the same way. further more, it's not true that fundamentalism has been growing in the working class as a percentage. among those still profess a religion has been growing but at the same time what nobody seems to have noticed is actual religious involvement has plummetted like a rock. i've been talking about the decay in the founding virtues in the working class but i

began this by saying that there is an emerging new lower class. that's not the same thing. it's a subset of the working class. what do i have in mind? in many cases i have in mind pleasant personally unobjectionable people. so don't think initially about meth addicts and disorganized welfare mothers. a better way to think about most people in the new lower class is in terms of your own extended family and the extended family of your friends. someone or a couple of smns in that circle probably is someone who is quite pleasant you enjoy their company but they've never been able to quite get their act together. that's mostly what the new lower class involves. individually they're not much of a problem. if one adult male lives with a hard-pressed sister and her family because he just somehow can't manage to hold on to a steady job, that does put a lot

of stress on the sister's family. but that's manageable for the community. if a whole lot of males in a community are liing off relatives or girl friends, that puts lots of stress on the community. a man who fatsers a child without meaning to and then doesn't marry the mother may be a guise guy who is sorry that it happened and maybe he tries to do what he can to keep contact with the child. but that doesn't change the nature of the situation the child faces and if you have a whole bunch of such children doesn't make any difference if they're all nice guys you will still have the same problems with the socialization of the next generation for reasons that are beyond the capacity of individual fathers to control. people who don't go to church can be just as morally upright as those who do. no doubt about that. but they do not generate the social capital that the church going population generates. it's not their fault that social capital deteriorates but

that doesn't make the deterioration any less real. the empirical relationships that exist among marriage industriousness, hons city, religiocity, and the production of a self-governing citizenry means that the damage is done even though no one intends it. how big is the new lower class? well, there are no sharp edges for assessing who belongs and who doesn't. still, it is possible to get a sense of the magnitude of the problem by considering three sets of people who create difficulties for a free society. the first of these sets is men who can't make even a minimal living. the second is single women raising minor children. and the third is what i will call social it's lats. they are fully grown adults but they have no children, no engagement with the church, no engagement with any activities. such people are still very rare in the upper middle class and they are very common in the working class.

altogether, using algo rhythms i will not try to describe tonight, i put the proportion of the problematic populations in the working class at about 35% before the recession compared to about 10% in 1960. where as, in the upper middle class, those problematic populations have been steady at about 5%. there is that dwergeance again that is different in kind than anything the nation has ever seen. how do these numbers translate into real life in real communities? well, they translate into an unraveling of daily life in small ways and large. go to any working class community and you will find a variety of people who are making life difficult for their fellow citizens. it's not just that there nice guys who can't hold a job. it's also a growing number of men who have no intention of working if they can help it and

convince their girlfriends to support them and bankrupt them. fathers children abandon girls friends as soon as they learn a pregnancy has occurred and are never seen again. along side the single mothers who are trying hard to be good parents are mothers who use their three-year-old to baby sit the infant while they go out for the night, plus the common outright cases of physical and emotional abuse of children by the current live-in boyfriend of a single woman. coich churches that used to be centers for activity have closed. local schools find that they can't count on the same kind of parent involvement that they used to take for granted. problems that used to be solved by the neighborhood without calling in the authorities are now transferred immediately to the social service bureaucracies. it's not a crisis. it is as i said at the outset the unraveling of america's

civic culture. focused on the bottom third of white america. and almost all of the trends lines going the wrong direction in the working class are continuing to go down. so whatever is bad now about the situation is getting worse. and there's another thing to keep in mind. that 50% of the population in the middle i haven't talked about, their trend lines are going the wrong way as well. thafere aren't going the wrong way as fast as the working class but things are getting worse. ok. well, that's enough bad news for a while. here's the good news. the good news is that the upper middle class seems to be doing pretty well. but the bad news is there is that we have also developing a new upper class. now, at this point we're talking about another half dozen chapters of the book so i'm not going to try to give you more than the quickest sketch. here's the essence. back in 1994, richard j

hernstine and i argued in a book called the bell curve that the nation was in the midst of a fundamental change in the nature of its elites. three trends had gathered force after world war ii and were in full cry as we wrote. the increasing market value for brains, a college system that got almost all of the talented youth into college and did a really good job of sorting the very smartest ones into a handful of elite colleges, and finally the increasing degree to which the most able married the most able and passed on not only their financial success to their children but their abilities as well. we also saw an increasing isolation of the elites from the rest of the country as they developed a distinctive culture of their own. in the new book, i take a look at the situation 16 years later, i am able to add a lot of new evidence about all three of those trends and add new evidence about new trends as

well. after all the abuse that the bell curve took mostly for completely irrelevant reasons, i try hard to avoid saying we told you so, i don't think i'm entirme successful in that effort. many of you in this room me among them, by the way, recapitulate what's happened to the nation as a whole regarding the new upper lass in our own lives. and maybe that's the best way to talk about it. the older you are in this room, the more likely it is statistically that your parents did not have college educations and the more likely that you glue up in a working class or a lower middle class home yourself. you on the other hand, those of you who did grow up in those situations, did get a college education since you find yourself in this room and probably your spouses almost all have college educations and almost all of your children have college education. the younger you are in this room, the more lickly it is that your parents were in the

upper middle class, were college educated, and that you have spebt your entire life living in an upper middle class environment. because we are in this room in washington, d.c. we also recap pit late what's happened to the nation in terms of residential segregation. most of you live in capitol hill or northwest washington or in northern virginia, the adjoining suburbs or montgomery county. some of you in this room probably live in exclusive neighborhoods such as georgetown or mcclain. but a lot of you are probably in neighborhoods like kensington, maryland, north of chevy chase, south of wheaton, where i lived for several years back in the 1970s. and around washington, d.c., kensington is seen as a pretty run of the mill suburben neighborhood. well, let's just see how ordinary it isn't. take for every zip code in the

united states the median income as of the 19 -- sorry, 2020 census, and the -- -- as of the 2020 census, then combine those into a single index in rank order all the zip codes in the united states from top to bottom. and create a percent tile score for each zip code that is just like the percent yile scores on academic tests. if you're at the 80%ite until sath that means that only 20 people got a higher score than you did. if you are in a zip code that is at the 80th perstile that means that of all the americans in the united states, only 20 of them live in a zip code with a commm nation of education and income as high as your zip codes. so, for example, let's take zip code 20007. that's georgetown.

its pers tile score is 99.6. out of all the zip codes in northwest washington, west of the park, rock creek park, and the two tiers of zip codes above the border of d.c. in montgomery county, it is correct that kensington has the lowest. 97.7. all the others are in the 99 tth percent tile. to those of us who live in washington it looks like there's a world of difference between georgetown and kensington. compared to the rest of the nation they're both at the top of the pyramid. that wouldn't be so bad. oh, by the way, those who live in virginia i shouldn't leave you out. all the way from great falls all the way through arlington, all the zip codes 99th percent

tile. this wouldn't be so bad if most who came to washington grew up in places where most people live in small towns and rural areas because that's where most americans still live. but once again, the older you are, living in this room, the -- being in this room. the older you are, the less likely it is that you grew up in a place like that. i'm sorry. i have just gotten that sentence completely wrong. the older you are, the more likely it is that you grew up in a place like that and that you bring with you to your mature success memories of life in those parts of the country. the younger you are, the more likely that you grew up not only in an upper middle class suburb but one that was a suburb of new york, chicago, st. louis, seattle, or one of the nation's other major cities that you have never had an experience with any other kind

of america except maybe for four years when you lived attached to but not of a small town that housed williams college or middle bri college or vasser or some other elite school where you attended. speaking of elite schools, that's another conversation that comes into play when we talk about the isolation of the new upper class. the great many of those who hold elite positions have not only been in the upper middle class bubble but in the elite college bubble as well. one of the chapters about the new upper class tracks the residences of more than 14,000 graduates of harvard, yale, and princetop. i assembled the zip codes where they live when they were in their 40's or early 50s. the highest density of graduates of those three institutions is in the zip codes west of cambridge, massachusetts. the second highest density concentration of such people is in princeton, new jersey.

the third highest is in the zip codes of northwest washington and the adjacent montgomery county zip codes. third highest in the entire nation. when i asked my colleague to lone my the direct loan me the directry he wrote me an e-mail about the place in northwest d.c. where he lived for 31 years on my former block in washington, d.c. where my next door neighbors, princeton 57 and rad cliff 66, the folks next to them both harvard 64 and the people across the street yale 71 and yale law school 74 plus me harvard 66 and yale law 69. just the typical american neighborhood, in other words. when the people out in the rest of the country say that america doesn't inhabit the same planet they do, they are exaggerating only a little. the same thing applies to the new upper class across the

country. especially in the cities where if most powerful figures in the entertainment, news, it, and financial industries live. that's new york city and its envirnse, los angeles and its envirnse, and san francisco and its environs. what a picture i am painting. a new lower class whobs members are increasingly unsuited for citizenry in a free society, a new upper class that is increasingly isolated from, ignorant of, and something i haven't gone into but is also true increasingly hostile toward a larger mainstream culture. given that kind of portrait, what does the future look like? well, that's another four chapters of the book that i'm not going to say much about except a few things. if you are a pessimist, you can find lots of reasons to think that all is lost for the american project. the parallel that keeps nagging

at me is rome. in terms of wealth and military might and territorial reach, rome reached its apy, i have given authority in saying this, reached its apy and it remained powerful for a few centuries after that. so was the end of the republic way back in 49 bc a big deal or not? in terms of the wealth and power and territorial reach of rome, no it was not a big deal. but for romans who treasured the republic, it was a tragedy and it was a tragedy that no amount of imperial splendor could redeem. the united states faces a similar prospect. continuing on its road toward a european style welfare state remaining at least as wealthy and powerful as ever but leaving its heritage behind. i'm not evoking the image of an

emperor-led united states. we can still have a president and a congress and a supreme court. but the united states will be just one more in history's procession of dominant nations. everything that makes america exceptional will have disappeared. so there are many days that i wake up as a pessimist but by mid morning i start to recall a few brighter spots. the first is that over the course of the next decade or so we in the united states are going to be watching the european model implode. it's going to implode in some countries that do not permit massive immigration because they just can't pay the bills any more and they're going to go bankrupt. the welfare states are. in other countries that do encourage massive immigration to help pay the bills they will undergo cultural changes and the people who have power are not going to be really fund of the swedish model of the welfare state.

so as we watch what happens to the advanced welfare state over the next decade, it's going to be a cautionary example. and trying to emulate it is going to look less and less attractive. the second conversation is the increasing obviousness that there has to be an alternative. we are the richest country on earth. with a couple of hundred million people out of our pop lailings who don't need a penny in government support. the entire welfare state could disappear tomorrow and they would do just fine. and yet, we spend a couple of trillion dollars a year on transfer payments. for those of you who don't think that social security and medicare are transfer payments, you have not been paying attention. for people like me, this is already crazy. we aren't looking at a situation in which we could save a few tens of billions of dollars without hurting anybody. we are looking at a situation where we could save a few trillions of dollars without hurting anybody.

as the amounts of money we transfer continue to balloon over the next years, at some point it will become obvious not only to libertarians like me that this is crazy, it will become obvious to everyone who is not certifiable. there must be another easier way of dealing with human needs than this beheemutsdz of the advanced welfare state. the third conversation is that the united states has a history of confounding pessmitses. wher the american project has suffered a wound that looks fatal, somehow things have always worked out more or less. concan it happen again? why not. the phenomenon of the tea party is a case in point. if you go to the tea party's web page their list of core principles in total reads individual freedom, limited federal government, personal responsibility, free markets, and returning political power

to the states and the people. that's it. and there is not a single item in that list that to me ought to be controversial with regard to the original nature of the american project and what it stands for. it remains true, however, that the tea party itself is controversial. any tea party event in which anybody express as whiff of no notesdzingism or theetcratic ambitions or etsdz no centrix, that gets plenty of coverage on the news, where as the other events that have none of that and focused on the core principles of america don't get the attention. but i also have to admit that some of the more visible people who set themselves up as speaking for the tea party are just as objectionable to me as michael moore and keith oberman. so there are problems with the tea party but the bottom line is this. a huge grass roots movement has arisen spontaneously in defense of the principles that animated

the american project in the spring of 2009 it didn't look remotely possible that such a thing could happen. a lot of people have gone broke betting against the resilience of the american project and i am not about to take that chance when i get around to setting down my best guess about the prospects for the future. from the beginning, america has had deevets, large and small, including the largest, the unbearable internal contradiction of slavery and its aftermath. but the history of the american project taken in its grand sweep has been one of breath taking progress in which free people without the dictates of government steadily remediate the nation's short comings while creating a civic culture that inspirited our own people but those around the world who came here to share it. we are now in a phase when we still have to convince many of

our fellow citizens that the federal government is akin to the rooster who thinks its crowing makes the sun reist but that is a case that can be made not just with rhetoric but with impirkically with numbers, with data, with evidence. what we have going for us is reality. from the founding through its first two centuries, the united states fostered a different way for people who live together unique among the nations of the earth that is still meshably precious to some very large number of americans who are determined that this way of living together will endure and prevail. thank you very much. [applause]

>> thank you. we have questions and the drill is that when i call on you, somebody will come and bring you a microphone. and i saw a hand back there. christopher former president of aei, my long-time boss. [inaudible] blacks and latinos so as to avoid misunderstanding so as to make the conclusions particularly stark but then after you presented all of the data that you have assembled, you drew conclusions about america as a whole. so from your data, you are moving directly to this is what's happened to america. i understand the reasons for your anlitcal approach but i wonder if at the end when you're characterizing america as a nation as a people, whether you have tried to add

the blacks and the latinos back in. and, if so, how that affects your portrait and your conclusions. >> that's chapter 17. yes, you're right. it's very important to say at the end of this, ok, folks, we've been talking about nonlatino whites. now let's expand it. in chapter 17 i fake most of the trend lines. i don't try to do all of them but i take most of the trend lines from the earlier chapters and i say here's what they look like when you add everybody in. and turf say this is one of these cases when i saw the results i was surprised after i saw them i could think back and say well i shouldn't have been surprised but i was surprised for the following reason. i'm familiar, as most of you are that jouth of we hadlock birth are higher among the black population than whites so won't you get a worse

situation. that's true for other kinds of ind caters as well. it doesn't work that way because when you add in everybody you're adding in a variety of populations and a lot of times that counter balance each other. the fact is that when you present these trend lines for all americans, they look almost identical. to the ones that i present for white america. . .

or are they bifurcating into another upper and lower part? >> you are talking about k-12 teachers, technicians, sales people, people and all kinds of light-collar jobs. different indicators showed different things. there is not a generalization to be made about that. the generalization is there always in the middle. there is no cleese -- case where

the middle class is higher than the zero upper class in terms of an indicator. -- in the upper class in terms of an indicator. they look more like the working class and upper middle class. it looks that is the upper middle class has been remarkably stable on a whole bunch of things, and everyone else has not. yes? >> i am at the hudson institute. two questions. in your index of income by zip code, do you account for the cost of living? the cost -- cost of living is very different. if you adjust for that, people

might be better off in the lower-income counties. in montgomery county, you can see an influx of immigrants, particularly asian. it is not who are doing very well who were coming -- upwardly mobile. it is not as at these counties are istatic. they have other people that have moved from other areas in them. >> that is true. with regard to differences in cost of living, i did not try to take that into account, but in a sense it is not relevant. if you go to new york, you will find someone making $175,000 per year who is living in a very small, cramped apartment, but holds quite a prestigious u position. it is quite true the standard of

living can be quite different. if they are in new york, the standard of living is not quite moines.as is in the mornindes so when these criteria for rankings of code splits the upper east side and the upper west side of new york in the upper 99 percentile, i do not think that is a misrepresentation in the role of homes of the new upper class. the second aspect involves immigrants, and a lot of people are making their money initially for the first time. all of the turning that goes on in american society, and i do not mean to in any way deny that, however, it is also true that in your most elite zip codes, that is not the kind of person you were getting moving in. you do have a high percentage of

people in the elite zip codes into are asian. that is true. i cannot tell you whether they are new immigrants or not. maybe i could, but i have not. there are about double of agents that are in the elite zip codes. you probably have some of that kind of phenomenon you're talking about. you also have a great deal of continuity. so i went back and looked at 1960 in the top neighborhoods, and the top neighborhoods now, and they are very similar. i cannot comment in any more detail on that particular issue, because i have not looked at it in great detail. we have a lot of hands. to go i am an entrepreneur. my question largely pertains to the free market were utilizing.

i am a great admirer of all lot of your work on libertarianism in general, but i tend to get a little wary of using something like race as a metric, it because it is a little bit fuzzy. it is fluid and highly variable over time. i wonder if when we employ that, and for the same reason i have concerns about some of the other metrics. for example, marital status. if we're not potentially overlooking some other important contributing factors. i find myself in broad agreement with most of the conclusions toward the end of your presentation, but when i consider, for example, income stratification and these other things, i presume there might be others in things that work in

the broader economy, like the changing in the nature of the opportunities available to most people that require a higher level of education attainment, or with the white cohorts that we discussed earlier, if there is a decline at the rate in which immigrants are joining this cohort. might that account for a degradation of the protestant work ethic, which is so central to the american project as you describe it? >> one of the nice things using working class is that a whole lot of the complicating issues about what is happening to the labor market and how that has affected labor market participation, a lot of those get pushedthe argument of profen

of the university of chicago that the jobs move from the inner city to the central city out to the suburbs. all of that gets swept away. that could have affected whites and central city neighborhoods, but there are other whites around the country were the jobs were coming to them as opposed to leaving them. that emphasizes the way that the ways i am talking about this and why you had these changes in the labor force behavior, there are other things to delve into. it is not to say that the white labor force behavior was not affected by what was going on in other groups. i think and interaction effect there is quite possible. but that leads to a really interesting thing to ponder. late 1990'sbout the when jobs were everywhere.

anybody who wanted a job in a white 1990's could find a job. why is that all white male age is 30 -- -- why would he not be in the work forces when he was healthy? why would they be leaving? it is an interaction affected you're talking about, maybe so, but in a broader sense, it does not make any difference what the causes are. it is reflective of a different attitude toward work, toward industriousness, then used to exist. of fundamental change in the norm. i guess what i'm saying is that that is what i have identified, this procedure. we can all talk about why this happened, but the fact that it has happened is important for the future of the american project all by itself. michael.

>> hi michael brown at aei. i am disappointed to find out my farmers of code was only a 99.6%. maybe those cheap apartments there. [laughter] >> charles comedy presented this as an aberration from a long- term trend in american life. you have made reference to contemporaries of toefl in describing our characteristics. but i wonder if the starting point of 1960 is a little specific to a generation and not necessarily typical of american life. you had the end of the baby boom generation, for we had rises and birth rates rather than declines, which usually get when societies become more affluent. i wonder if you could not look at 1910 or the 1900's, to we see some of the same things in the cities that.

dreiser is writing novels about, the huge gap between north and south. some -- some expect industriousness as well. maybe we have gone back and forth more in our history, which gives us cause for optimism now. then the presentation you made. >> there are some ways in which we can go back further. for example, takes something like the poverty rate, or scholars have calculated retrospectively using the decennial census the poverty rate back to 1930. as of 1940, we were still in the majority of the populace and below the poverty line in constant dollars using the official poverty definition. we also know that from 1940-for 1960, it dropped like a rock. that is the great irony on a

whole war and poverty. limiting credible progress in those 20 years. there was an inflection point around the 1960's and that is true. what did you have ups and downs, and you certainly have them in crime. in crime, a big spike in the 1920's. do you have a spike in labor force participation, i do not think we have the data for that? but i will say this. i did choose 1960 partly because that was the earliest feasible time i could get all the data i needed. but for another reason as well, on a whole bunch of trends, the united states was heading in the right direction on industriousness, religion eos city, honesty, and marriage. we were headed in the right

direction. things changed in the 1960's. social capital is a fascinating example. documenting what has been happening to social capital, is not the case that in the 1920's, if we were really religious and then we became less religious. we were much more religious and terms of the measures of attendance of church in the 1950's than we were in the 1920's. i do not need to go into the other ways in which things were headed in the right direction, and so many of those turned around, and not only in the right direction in the people at the top, but for the people at the bottom. when you have been writing about these issues as long as you have, you're afraid you're sounding like a broken record. 1984, and 1960's in it is pathetic that i will be bashing the 1960's now, but doggone it, they have a lot to

apologize for. [laughter] when robert putnam, bless his heart, a wonderful scholar, i admire his work enormously, he takes all of these ways in which social capital was going up during the 1950's, start the goes down, and he says that the model year in which these trendlines refers was 1964. and then he says, he does not think these conservatives is it that big government had something to do with that are right. and i say, 1964? i start with 1960 for that reason. the united states could have kept on getting better in all sorts of ways without what happened. right behind there. >> you have described how you

have rain to all your zip codes by combining education equal and median income. had you looked at data that similarly rank quarters as it cuts in terms of political contribution to the federal election commission? and how much of an overlap would there be? i think it would be almost complete. >> what a great idea. i did not realize that that data was available by sitka. i am heading home tonight. that is a great idea. i will tell you what i have done. if computed the ada ratings of representatives by zip codes after the redistricting. i have the average rating of the congressman for all those of cuts in the country. i started to look at that sort

of thing. that is yielding interesting stuff in disaggregating zip code is not just by income and education, but on another dimension. there are read said codes and blues of codes even among the elite is a codes that provide interesting contrast in terms of the segregation of those of codes from other americans, and collateral characteristics. i have not thought about doing what you're doing. all wonderful idea. >> i am sure you have looked at the big sort. i cannot remember -- thank you very much. he put the inflation point at 1965, after the summer of 1965, and some of the key turning points, of falling away of trust in major parties and other institutional things.

the vietnam war, 200,000 at the end, if you have a high point of the civil rights movement, the voting rights act, the march on summit, and then you have the right and what is, is the great turning away, the big indicators. i wanted to know what you thought of that as an inflation. and when polls showed that? second, there are some parallels. there was a landslide election of the democratic party after the november of 1964, goldwater lost. a huge expansion over the extension of the democratic party agenda in the great society and the vietnam war, if you want to call that a democratic agenda or not. you had a similar event with the election of obama. arguably and overreach of the democratic party in terms of health care legislation, and a

similar involvement and expansion of overseas involvement with what we're doing now in libya and elsewhere and the surge in afghanistan. do you see a parallel? and the tea party as a response? is there a parallel there? >> really interesting. bill bishop wrote that book that the gentleman referenced. it is a terrific book. it talks about the way that we have sorted ourselves, especially politically, into two common genius enclaves. --, genius -- homogenous enclaves. what was a very fundamental change in the role the federal government with the civil rights act of 1964, landmark change. not argue about good or bad, but it was huge.

along with that -- i'm not going to get specific with 1964 or 1965. it is the mid-1960s, where a whole bunch of things were coming together. it was not just the war on poverty but also supreme court decisions which radically change the role of the federal government. there was at that time and i am thinking on my feet here because you're parallels are fascinating. there was at that time a broad sense in middle america this is not what we bought into in the past. this is not what we thought our covenant was with the government. i think there is a similarity with what happened in the last couple of years. speaking from someone on the right, someone who hangs out with other people on the right, i know for a fact that a lot of us were saying, these guys are not playing by the rules with the health care bill. this is not what you do when you get signals from the electorate

that you do not want. there was a sense that you're not playing fair. i think it was also in the 1960's. and with that sense of not playing fair, it comes a breakdown in all kinds of trust. it is broken covenants, and that is probably what i would in the process of answering a question at live like this. that is what would stick in my mind as the common feature between 1965 and the last couple of years. a really interesting idea. we will try right here. i am sorry i'm not able to get so many of you. to get monm >> mona charen. you've talked about the changes that you have traced from the 1960's about the things that we think are uniquely american. so much of your focus is also on

the welfare state and the influence of the welfare state on behavior. i am wondering if you have looked at all at the european experience since their welfare states predated hours, and whether they had seen similar social consequences to marriage and so on. with their older welfare states. >> i look upon the advanced welfare states in europe as a canary in the coal mine, and not in terms of an underclass as much as the whole population. if you are talking about industriousness, the united states is than outliar -- is an outlier. in the analysis, large portions of people still say that they love their work and i find it hard to put aside at the end of the day, much higher than in most european countries. a couple of exceptions, not

many. religiousity, you know the story about that. europe is in a post-christian age. christian. post-attenda [laughter] marriage, marriage rates are far lower in europe than they are in the united states and have dropped more precipitously. you're mostly familiar with the childbearing rates, the fertility rates, way below replacement. and by the way, in terms of honesty you've seen increasing crime rates. if you take any of the institutions through which we are talking about these virtues and their european counterparts and the welfare state, i do not think you can make the case that these have not decayed enormously in ways that suggested very calls -- a very close call link with the

features of the welfare state, something i have written about in a book called "in our hands." i pointed at you. >> i am bill lancaster, up founding member of a charter school. it is our sixth year. we of one all kinds of awards, national and international. we have twice the number of african american students that the county does. we have eliminated the achievement gap, unheard of. the county is under federal injunction because of the achievement gap and yet the people who support the regular schools like us to than mail. i think we have a problem in our judicial system. we have another school in baltimore, and we have the state -- the secretary of education for the state of virginia, three delegates from

the state of virginia, and eight other people -- >> we have a whole bunch of people waiting to ask a question. >> i think you should exit -- should have mentioned education. >> that is a book called "real education." you have me add another gathering and i will do 20 minutes on your question. i am not pointed to it tonight because of the different nature of the topic. but the speed with your charter school. the gentleman right next to you. >> i really appreciated the positive note on which you ended your talk. let me perversely ask a question about the possibility that optimism is not warranted. a colleague of maine likes to say there was always in america, it's just not might be the united states. if they were to come to pass, where do you think it would be?

where else in the world to you see the trends and the culture going a direction that would produce the equivalent of the american project? >> no place comes to mind. it is a rare combination of qualities you have to have. and the thing i am thinking of especially, i know have libertarian friends to think i am main wuss for talking so much about community, but there are a whole lot of cultures around the united states, or around the world that have wonderful tradition of hospitality. but there are very few cultures around the world that have wonderful traditions of people voluntarily helping their neighbors who are not related by blood. very few, and when i say very few, maybe just one. england having second place,

but england with its class system means that set the place is not that close. the united states civic culture whereby from the very first everyone marvelled the way that americans constantly said they were pursuing their own self- interest, but in fact, they spend huge amounts of energy collaborating with each other to solve problems. i do not know of anywhere else in the world that has ever done that. and i do not see anywhere else in the world that looks like it is on the cost of doing that. when i talk about american exceptionalism, that is at the top of my list. >> you mentioned not dumb and also 1965, and then they use it immigration -- you mentioned it , and also 1965, and then you mentioned immigration

and the effect on social capital. >> you must excuse me. my hearing is not the greatest and i'm having a hard time following you. to speak a little louder please. >> the lower class has to compete with immigrants for jobs. go to school with them and live around them, all the upper class gets higher classis, lives in the suburbs, and hires immigrants to be their nannies. i know you say immigration will not solid, but will it is exacerbated? >> if the trend lines had tilted upward in sync with the competition for jobs, i think that case is a strong one. in most cases, these trendlines started going in the wrong direction before immigration became an issue. i agree that the competition for

blue-collar jobs posed by illegal immigration has been really serious, and that there are a lot of white blue-collar workers who are incensed that you had illegal immigrants working for a couple of bucks less an hour and the employers do not have to pay them benefits, and it is making life difficult for them. i agree that all that is true. it is also true that if you go to small contractors or painters or plumbers or electricians or other skilled labor and you cannot get them to come at your house for a while because they are so overloaded with work, and when they do, they say, you say add more people, and that was a it is almost impossible for them to find young whites males or females who want to learn their trade in return for good wages. they do not want to do that and they cannot find them too high. i do not think this is a matter

of anecdote. i think this reflects the kind of been. -- deterioration of industriousness that i use statistics to try to prove. immigration is relevant to the issues for the reasons you say. something else is happening in the working class that is much more insidious. >> has there been -- has moral relativism played any role in this? i can hear the clarion call from churches about moral rectitude, and then you hear from our church-based institutions discussions of victimhood and the system. i wonder if there has not been a psychic shift? i am a catholic and i am wondering if of back in ii screwed things up -- if vatican

ii screwed things up? [laughter] >> one of the curious things about the upper middle class is precisely that they are behaving in all the right ways. they are getting married, working hard, the hours worked per week for the upper middle class, huge and they have gone up rather than down for most of this period. they are doing all the right stuff. they will not dare say that this is the way people ought to be. they will not preach what they practice. i put this down to nonjudgmental is some rigid nonjudgmental -- nonjudgmentalism. who am i to say? one of the things i do in my own book is to say that this has got to stop. it is almost as if the upper

middle class is keeping the good stuff to itself. i talk about the ways in which these things, and industriousness and religiousisy contributed to human flourishing, people are happier, the fillmore the film lives. the upper middle class knows this. why not say it out loud and say, what we are preaching here is what we are practicing, and is not because we want you to work harder so you can pay more taxes, if it is because this is human flourishing. they will not say yet. edward crane. >> i want to defend the tenement with the charter schools to use so abruptly cut off there. [laughter] >> i'm so glad you came to nine. >> i knew you would be. it seemed to me that the public school system is very much a driver of the social pathology

you are talking about. they do not teach moral values. at that standards, the concept of state money. -- stigma. i think that of the charter schools that will create an environment -- the so that mafia captain send their kids to private schools because they get barrel -- better moral grounding. [laughter] i think that school choice is a very big element of solving the problems you have outlined. >> i agree with that. and i am sorry that i could not respond fully to the gentleman because i had so many other people like you sticking up their hands. [laughter] this will have to be the last question. you have been very patient with putting up with this long period.

>> thank you for your presentation. i am wondering whether you can comment as to the extent to which the decline in industriousness and work in the working class is specifically a male phenomenon. my understanding which may be wrong is that the decline in work among the working class has really been entirely among the male population. is that right? is this a global phenomenon by gender or just american? and what the answers to those questions suggest about potential causes of this phenomenon. >> and 3 minutes before 7:00. you are right. it is concentrated among males, almost exclusively. women have increased their labor force for dissipation drastically, but the norms of change so much, you cannot tell what is going on in terms of tramlines very easily.

it is a male phenomenon. what has been going on? whether it is international, i do not know. i think a large part of the explanation lies in some phenomenon that other people besides me have noted, which is males are floundering, especially in the working class, as to what their role is any more. the women do not need them as much as they used to, as helpmeets for their children, the women themselves are competing with them for the same jobs and getting higher because they will work harder than the guys will. and whereas in the upper-middle- class, a lot of the turmoil of the change in roles in the workplace, gender roles, a lot that has been assimilated and people feel comfortable. in the working-class where a guy is working a lot of times at a boring job, and not well paying, it was really important that he be able to say to himself, i am

supporting my wife and children and if it were not for me, they would be in bad shape. that has changed a lot. and with that change has become -- has come a demoralization that israel. i do not use this as an excuse. i still think they are being feckless. but then that be part of the explanation. this has been a lot of fun. as thank you for your attention. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2011] [captioning performed by national captioning institute]

>> next, eric bates on the special report concerning u.s. soldiers in afghanistan. than the weekly addresses by president obama and house budget committee chairman paul ryan. after that, a senate hearing examines the census process. >> this weekend, a look of the great coat president lincoln was wearing at ford's theatre the night he was assassinated. george shultz on working in the nixon white house and his behind-the-scenes efforts on school desegregation. from detroit, hear from the descendants of slaves who travel the underground railroad to freedom in michigan. if the complete schedule at c- span.org/history. in our schedules e-mail directly to you. >> now discussion discussing the report on u.s. troops in afghanistan. from tuesday's washington journal, this is 40 minutes.

continues. journal" host: joining us from new york city is eric bates, executive editor at "the rolling sne." he is joining us to talk about "the kill team." you can see the article on their web site, along with the pictures that were taken by members of the group. we warn that some of these pictures are grim and graphic. tell us what happened. tell us what happened and what was the involvement in this group known as "the kill team. " guest: this was a group that over the course of four months basically went on a killing spree in afghanistan, selecting

an armed afghanistans for execution and then planting weapons on their body to make it look like the soldiers have been been attacked. the killed at least four people that we know of. they often took treasures from the body, cutting off fingers and toes. host: who was taking the photographs? guest: it was part of a group of thousands of photographs that soldiers took. some of them were of children, afghan people. some were taken by the soldiers posing with bodies and the civilians they killed. other photographs we do not kw who took. it looks like other soldiers took them. one of the disturbing things is

that among some of the photographs it appears there mtd soldiers of the on this particular unit. there is one set of photographs that shows several afghanistas tied up on the sidef the road. this was another group that did that to those men in the photographs. ourt: we want to onwarn viewers and listeners that me of the pictures can be graphic. this is part of an article that rightwrites --

host: how did this story come to the attention of mike bowl? guest: the store has been reported well. 12 of the soldiers are charge. some have already been convicted in the killings. what mark did is take a look at the complete army investigative record we obtained and really tried to piece together the narrative of how this happened. what is disturbing is that this platoon has been portrayed by the pentagon as road platoon, that they went off on their own and no one diknew they did this. when we look at the record, it looks like the responsibility for the killings may go higher and wider than the pentagon has led us to believe.

it looks like other units may have participated in these kinds of war crimes as well. and host: how unusual is it that none of the officers who may have been involved have been charged with this? guest: what is disturbing is it was sort of an open secret among the soldiers that this was happening here ye. they boasted about it among themselves and to other platoons. one soldier said that the platoon had a rutation for staging killings and getting away with it. it is widely known. the real question is why officers who were involved who were in a position to release some suspicions about what was happening were not disciplined? the first lieutenant of the unit that did this has been promoted to captain. host: we're talking to eric

bates. he is coming to us from new york stone"out th"the rolling coverage of "the kill team." if you want to be involved in the coverage, give us a call. we will remind you that if you go to the rolling stone website to read the article, some o the pictures can be quite graphic our first call comes from pennsylvania. joe on the line for democrats. and caller: i am wondering why a lot of the other news outlets will not cover this information when we should have freedom of the press, and it takes a good

rock-and-roll magazine to let us know the facts. thank you for taking my call. guest: that is a very interesting question. i have been surprised by the lack of coverage in the traditional media and the last week of this report in the release of the photographs. in this case i think the photographs are so graphic and gruesome, television has had a hard time figuring o how to handle this. if they do not have visuals, they tend not to cover things. the rest of the media haseen very reluctant to pick this up. part of this has to do with the fact it was u.s. sdiers engaged in this atrocity. perhaps that is something for the american people to really fix.at and experiencnd host: next up, augusta, maine, on the line for democrats.

caller: good morning. i appreciate your magazine. my question has to do with drug use among american soldiers in afghanistan. i have seen videos of troubled american soldiers having to train afghanistan police because they are stoned all th time. and i am wondering if we have been the idea of what the incidence is of drug abuse among american soldiers? my second question has to do with the ultimate impact and cost of this war. we have almost 1.5 million soldiers who will be returning at one point in time who have served multiple tours, and i am wondering if people really calculate the cost of posttraumatic stress treatment and the cost of compensation and disability. thank you. guest: the first question i cannot speak to how widespread drug use is, but i can say with

in this particular unit that was committing the crimes, it was clear the soldiers were basically getting high allot. -- getting high a lot. the way that these crimes came to light was through drug use. one soldier ironically named stoner went to complain to his superiors that the other guys were smoking in his room and did not like it. when the other guys found out that he told on them, they beat them up. certainly i do not think this platoon is alone in drug use. as to the cost and the consequences of returning soldiers, i think we will s them more and more. we have covered several stories of soldiers returning from iraq who have had real difficulties

with posttraumatic stress disorder. in some cases who have killed other people in the state's. i think this is going to be something unfortunately we will see a lot more of an have to grapple with here at home, the consequences of these very young men in these kinds of situations. host: as a matter of fact there is a piece on the incident you referred to. host: bk to the phones. jacksonville, n.c., on the line for independence. go ahead. caller: i am in the marine

corps. it is really unfortunate one small group can stand the entire military, because this is not an everyday thing, and it is sad that the ones that are dying every day or the ones that have been captured, it is just sad that this is talked about when all the other things happening every day. is there a concern that this is putting about lights on all the military operating in afghanistan? guest: i would have opposite concerned that stories like these did not get covered enough as compared to the heroism and other thgs that soldiers engaged in. because of the nature of the crimes, it is very hard for people to face up to them, so i think it is very important look at them. one of the disturbing things is

it is not necessarily a group of small soldiers. the pentagon went through extraordinary leads to keep these photographs under wraps. -- lengths to keep these photographs under wraps. the pentagon set agents across the united states to get photographs and thumb drives across united states to get these so that no one would ever see them. one of the reasons for the court seal is that the photographs would negatively impact the reputation of the military. the judge in the ptagon had the same concern as the callers did about how this would make people look at the armed forces. i think ultimately, while that is a concern, what is more important is that we look at any possibility of wrongdoing, and criminal wrongdoing, and make sure everyone is held accountable for it. the only way to make sure this does not happen again is to make sure the command structure knows of things kind

will not be tolerated and officer in charge will be held accountable. host: how did "the rolling stone" come across these photographs? guest: we a tamed them from a source. -- we obtain them from a source. hem from a source. we have many more that we have not shared. in a lot of cases we felt that we just did not know enough to put them out there and say what we were looking at. host: two of the soldiers featured in the article feature corporal more lock and david brown. tell us about corporate morlock and why he is central to this

article. guest: he was convicted a week ago on three counts of murder. he pleaded guilty to a guilty sentence in exchange for testimony against the team leader who the pentagon i portraying as the ringleader of the killings. he grew up in alaska, not far from the palain's. there is really a question about whether he should have been allowed in the military to begin with. the military has been lowering its standards because they are desperate for recruits. he had a real history of getting into trouble, of getting drunk, the scene of a serious car accident. only a month before deployment he was charged with disorderly conduct after burning his wife

with a cigarette. there is a real question as to whether he should have been in the military to begin with. host:we are talking with eric bates, executive editor of "the rolling stone" we're talking about actions of a group that has come to be known as "the kill team." vicki on the line for democrats. go ahead. caller: thank you. i just want to point out that we as americans are doing this to young men who are willing to find out what their adult life is going to be by signing it over to us, to this country. i believe the soldiers do not have a sense of value and dignity and as americans over there and their purpose.

i think it is no wonder that the suicide rate for the military is so high. i just cannot help but wonder if there are any suicides in connection with this incident. people who were aware of it and just could not bear to be affiliated with it. guest: that is an excellent question, and i think that the point is well made also. what is disturbing is to see the military's reaction to this. while it is admirable they're prosecuting these 12 men to try toinimize it and portray it as only this one group of soldiers, when there seems to be evidence to suggest that culpability may be wider than that. the military has a responsibility to implicate the troops with the right values and

right approach. if you have this degree of a serious breakdown where u.s. soldiers are picking out a 15- year-old boys and gunning them down for no reason, you really have to ask, is the military doing its j and is there more serious breakdown they need to be addressing? host: in an article he writes this --

host: back to the phones. alberta on the line for republicans. you are on eric bates with "the magazine.one's" caller: the problem is guys like you. if you did not fight for this cotry, you should not be in this position. which you it is all about money and putting your face on television. i would like to see all you

people all here pointing fingers. guys like me to our disabled and to ruin us. the problem is with the american people, what would happen if this happened in this country? we fought kids in vietnam. i do not want to hear your nonsense in your stupid magazine. you should be ashamed of yourself. host: have you had a chance to read this article? caller: no, but i have p.t.s.d. host: let me read you a little bit of the article --

caller: this is every day war. we should not be there if these people are going to put this on tv. i got busted in vietnam. i was not allowed to shoot back. this is what is wrong with the media. host: we're going to leave it there. eric bates, go ahead. ' anger is callers an

understandable. they are asked to take life-and- death situations in an instant, and in not battlefield situation there is no question that mistakes can occur and that horrible things can happen. what is really important to understand in this case is this is not a story about the fog of war. this is not a story about civilians under attack and accidentally killing civilians. this is a story about soldiers who decided to kill unarmed civilians who went out and targeted a 15-year-old boy. they picked him out at random. they called him over and gunned him down. after they gunned him down, the cut off his pinky finger and kept as a trophy.

it is very important to understand what we're doing is not meant as an attack on the troops for the soldiers. our concern here is the chain of command. are the folks who were in a position to know aut those, and at least have suspicions that something was going on and did not take actions to stop it? the case you just read is a 15- year-old boy who was gunned down. the day after this happened 20 villagers marched on the local base were the soldiers were house to complain to their superiors that the soldiers had killed the boy. the top officers at the base knew that the villagers were concerned to take this action and protest. that is why we put this out there. and not because we are attacking the soldiers, but we have real

concerns that the command structure is being held accountable. host: the last calller was a veteran. meliy was a single incident. as horrific as it was, involving an entire village, what is disturbing is the soldiers were doing this over and over again over a time of at least four months, where they were picking out civilians and executing them. they were also staging the killings toake it look like they have been attacked. they were gathering weapons that they could plant next to the bodies to make it look like they were enemy combatants. here you have a real calculated mindset over a period of time

and the sharing of the photographs of themselves posing with their victims. that is particularly disturbing. host: our next call comes from orlando, florida. bob on the line for indep endents. caller: i am a vietnam veteran. and i can understand someone really doing wrong, breaking the law, but if "the rolling stone" and mr. bates who had never been in combat, if they are so concerned about what is going on, why don't they just threaten to go public? look what they did to general crystal. i think "the rolling stone" is an outrage, and he suld be ashamed of himself for doing this portionf the magazine to

come out with this type of information. they could keep this under wraps. it is not necessary to expose the military to the atrocities they were doing. host: before you go, why is it so important in your mind that someone who was reporting on the wars in afghanistan have combat experience? caller: when you areeing shot at and you can feel the bulls going over your head and beside you and you see your body next you get shot, believe me, it just crews your mind up. -- screws your mind up. you do not know who you are fiting. we had a 10-year-o kid come

and blow himself up. it is scary. it is absolutely scary. host: eric bates, go ahead. guest: let me reiterate, this is not a case where the soldiers mistook a 15-year-old boy for a threat. this is a case where they saw a boy in the field, called him over, knew he was unarmed and represented no threat and just picked him not to execute him. and this is something i would think that veterans and former soldiers particularly would be very concerned about, becae it does besmirch the name of the military and honorable actions of some of the soldiers. i would think veteranwould be particularly a gas that this type of behavior and practically in a position to condemn it. certainly it is true, no one who has been in battle -- who has

not been in battle can begin to imagine what the experience is like. the concern is the pentagon operating in secrecy has intended to cover these things up here yet that is why exposure is necessary to make sure everyone knows what is going on in to makeure that those w have committed crimes, and we're not talking about accidental shootings in the midstf a bottle, we're talking about crimes were people were guilty that those people be prosecuted and those in the command position be held accountable if they did not take action to stop it. host: when you notified the pentagon you were going ahead with the story and have these pictures, what was thr response? guest: we did notify the pentagon. in part notified them because we wanted to see what they could tell us about the photographs, and we also notified them because we knew the reaction might potentially put troops in

rm's way. we want to give them a heads up that this was coming. they mostly spoke to was off the record, so i cannot tell you what they said, but in one on the record conversation we pointed to the photographs of the men edp beside the road, and we wanted to know if they were investigating who those men were, the circumstances under which there were killed, and whether u.s. troops were involved in the desecration of the bodies. basically the response of the pentagon is they have no way of knowing in no way of basically figuring out who the men in the photographs were. that was disturbing, because you could see from some of the related photographs that there were marks on the striker vehicles and other identifying signs that any peace investigator could have to track down what had happened in that incident. there is a real concern, and that is part of the region right we decided to go public with the material, that the pentagon was

not investigating this aggressively. host: our next call is from durum, north carolina. stacy is the next calller. caller: i find this all very disturbing. this is coming from someone who supports the troops in the hard work they're doing over there. i think that "the rolling stone" has gone beyond the pale. i know you d an awesome job for what you d to general crystal, and now you are doing a bang up job on what you're trying to portray the military as. i think if you took the same power and motivation to mexico, the killings in mexico, maybe your subscription would go up a lot more. knowing now that these people

are not little sweet, funny maybe you mightits, want to investigatehat. thank you. host: eric bates. guest: we have covered the war on drugs quite extensively in the war on mexico quite extensively. we have done at least two or three major features on that. in one case we went to try to track down a major drug lord and meet with him in person. that is an area we have paid a lot of attention to. i think there is a perception that by reporting this kind of atrocity that we're somehow tried to portray the entire military negatively. in fact, if you read the article, we try to explain exactly the circumstances that the soldiers found themselves in. they were a member of the fifth rigade. burgra

they found that the vehicles, which were supposed to provide th with a lot more mobility and armored protection simp did n work. the caliban figured out how to target the vehicles, and this burgrave suffered the highest casualty rates of any in the nine-year war. they were under attack under a daily basis. -- the taliban if you're out to target the vehicles, and this brigade set for the highest casualty rates of any in the nine-year war. th would send out patrol after patrol, never having any engagement with the enemy, and they were getting very frustrated. what is more is this command structure in this particular case appears to a created an environment where everyone was seen as the televisialiban.

here we are in a country where we are trying to win over the population to our side and our point of view, and the soldiers had come to see even children and elderly people as the enemy. they were going out and executing them for no reason. we went to great pains to try to understand the situation that the soldiers found themselves in and explain that to our readers. host: next up. wichita, kansas. caller: good morning. i am a 20-year navy veteran of vietnam. i can understand the vets that were in combat. i was in the navy off the coast. i can understand eir point, but i can also understand we cannot equate just because the taliban beheads people that we

can have troops killing people. i do not get the correlation. i am glad for your reporting on this. i also tnk you for your reporter. thank you. guest: thanks for your comments. importantt is for anyone that supports the troops that they should be particularly vocal in condemning this behavior. host: michigan. don on the line for indepen dents. caller:i am very glad for your reporting. i did not have to go to vietnam, but i am 72-years-old, and my

grandson is on his second tour for iraq. i have seen in my lifetime of fought the germans, japanese, italian, chinese, koreans. this seems endless. your article does a lot of good. hopefully people will learn that perhaps just killing people not going to solve of blooming thing. when we have these young people who leave tir families to go over and they are being told you have to kill the enemy, our so- called congressman, president, leaders are supposed to be adult enough to know what they are doing. instead of selling their souls to the military industrial complex for money and campaign contributions. host: don in michigan, thank y

for your call. go ahead, eric bates. guest: i think it is heartening to hear veterans that recognize this kind of atrocity is beyond the pale. it is not the reputation in the military, it is about making sure crimes are prosecuted fully and accountability is distributed. host: in an update that was posted on your web site, there is a report where a washington times correspondent got a couple of seconds with former defense secretary ron spelled who says that's -- defense secretary rumsfield who say the "kill team" photographs were much worse than the abu ghraib

pictures. put these stories into context for us as far as the people who are reading them and the effects they are having on people in the united states and throughout the world. gut: i think abu ghraib had an immediate effect. they mostly did not involve anyone being killed. people could see the cruelty with which prisoners were being treated by u.s. troops. i think ihad a very immediate impact. i think you saw some of the same coerns as you see with the killed team about whether the higher ups are being prosecuted as vigorously as the troops on the ground who directly committed the wrongdoing. in the case of abu ghraib, very

few higher-ups' were prosecuted. even though secretary rumsfield's own right-hand man was dispatched to basically teach the soldiers had to kill them and stimulate the through what reporting. those sorts of higher ups were never held accountable jt as they have not been so far in "the kill team." general crystal is a very different issue. it is one for respect of civilian command. we have a military in this country that is subject to civilian conol and command. here you have the leading general in charge of all troops in afgnistan basically openly dissing his civilian commanders. that is a very grave situation and one thatas real constitutional issues involved,

but was not a mter of immediate life and death. host: in this situation regarding "the kill team" can you tell is the highest commissions officer level involved in this? guest: as of this morning the pentagon released a report that was there was an investigaon into the command structure. apparently this investigation concluded that colonel tunnel, while not directly responsible or accountable in the killings had really let the environment group to get out ofad control where everyone in the groups of everyone asnemies and there was a real search and destroy a mentality that was counter to the military strategy of counterinsurgency, which involves protecting the local population win them over.

that said, the colonel was only given a letter of admonition. reprimande there appears to be lower- ranking officers that were reprimanded. i have not a chance to see which ones. until this report came out, all of this has been kept secret. host: next up, detroit, michigan. next up is bishop. caller: please allow me the time to complete my thoughts, because i tend to see you cut people off that do not agree with a certain point of view. i am a veteran of vinam. to study history and see that people do not follow it or learn from basically lies of history, we are doomed to repeat it.

it was not based on a lie. basically the military industrial complex and international bankers and what ever that profit off of the wars, they have a vested interest in dehumanizing us and the enemy. it takes honor away from war. host: we will leave it there. go ahead. guest: the war itself is about desensitizing people to death in killing. we have done articles in the past where we look at the way the military trains soldiers. basically in order to get young people to be able to kill and follow orders to kill, even in legitimate combat, involves a whole process of desensitizing them to the very idea they are killing people. they are not killing people,

they are identifying targets. that kind of language is. it is very difficult or very tricky in a combat situation to make those kinds of distinctions about who you were targeting into you are killing. in this case you had a very conscious effort by a group of soldiers to just go out a kill civilians who they knew posed no threat. host >> a political roundtable. we will talk about federal spending and the budget with grover norquiest. and then a conversation with john gage.

"washington journal" on c-span. >> in his weekly address, president obama talked about federal spending agreement that averted a shutout. he also talked about the need of continued compromise in future negotiations. then, paul ryan also discusses the federal agreement as well as his proposed budget for next year. >> this is good news for american -- the american people. folks can visit our museums and parks and hundreds of thousands of americans will get their paychecks on-time including our

brave men and women in uniform. this agreement invests in our country's future while making the largest cut in history. like any compromise, this requires everyone to give ground that was important. i certainly did. some of the cuts will be painful. programs people read by an will be cut back. projects will be delayed. i would not have made these cuts in better circumstances. we also prevented this debate from being overtaken by politics and disagreements on social issues. we begin to live within our means. that will help us compete. investments in education, student loans, clean energy, and medical research. reducing spending while still investing in the future is just common sense. it is what families do in tough times. they sacrifice where they can, even if it is hard, to afford

what is important. a few months ago, i was able to sign a tax cut for american families because we work through our differences and found common ground. now, the same cooperation has made it possible for us to move forward with the biggest cut in history. it is my hope we continue to come together as we face the many difficult challenges that lie ahead from creating jobs and growing the economy to educating children and reducing deficits. that is our responsibility. that is what the american people expect. it is what the american people deserve. >> i'm congressman paul ride from wisconsin. i'm chairman of the house budget committee. it is no secret we have a spending problem. it has gotten so bad it is threatening our future and hurting our ability to create jobs. republicans made a pledge that we would work to change this if

given the opportunity to leave. we have been urging president obama to listen to the people and work with us to reduce spending. he started this year by proposing a freeze that would make no cut at all. now, to enact the largest spending cut in american history. this is good news for job creators in america. much more has to be done to put our country at a true path to prosperity. the house budget committee advanced a new budget for the united states government that will move the debate in washington from of billions and cut to trillions. we did so because it is unconscionable to lead the next generation with a crushing burden of debt and a nation in decline. washington's obsession with the next election has come at the expense of the next generation. we are calling this budget to cut the path to prosperity."

it is a commitment. to honor the american legacy, and leaving more prosperous nation. by removing the anchor of debt and advancing tax reforms, this budget is a jobs budget. it sends signals to investors and job creators that a brighter feature is possible. a future in which america is still an engine of growth. right now, that legacy is in danger. this nation is going deeper and deeper into debt. the spending choices we make today will determine the lives of children enjoy tomorrow. the facts are these -- washington has not been telling you the truth about the magnitude of the problems we are facing. unless we act soon, government spending on health and retirement programs will crowd out spending got everything

else. that includes national security. it will take every cent of every federal tax dollar just to pay for these programs. experts have been clear about what this means. each day that congress fails to act, the government takes one step closer to breaking its promises to current retirees. each year that policy makers kicked the can down the road, mean streets of dollars in and he promises are being made to future generations. if we stay on the current path, we are heading toward a economic crisis. citing cuts to vital programs, runaway inflation, or all three. make a mistake, the prospect of a crisis is casting a shadow on economic activity. uncertainties keeping job creators from hiring as fast as they should be. businesses know that all of this borrowing means higher taxes and

lower incomes for customers down the road. the kong -- advancing a solution to this crisis will begin to restore confidence and create better conditions for job creation. the recent budget proposal is worse than just a commitment to this status quo. it would accelerate the country posted a descent into the debt crisis. it would double the debt held by the public and triple it in a decade. it would raise taxes by 1.5 trillion dollars. the problem is that washington spends too much, not that americans are taxed too little. it would enlarge the size of government by said -- sending a skyrocketing to levels that a healthy economy cannot sustain. it offers no real reform to save health retirement programs and

no leadership. our budget is different. instead of locking in the spending spree, our budget cuts 6.2 trillion dollars in spending from the president post a budget of the next 10 years. this keeps it consistent with the historical average of 20%. so that individuals can be free. instead of letting deficit spiral out of control, we keep borrowing in check. as that of adding 13 trillion dollars to the debt, and trillions more in the years to come, this with the crushing burden of debt that is threatening our economy and our children's future. it is not too late to get our country back on track so our kids can realize the american dream. we can and we must preserve this nation's exceptional promise. that is exactly what previous

generation's work so hard to do for us. it is time for officials in washington to stop acting like politicians and to start acting like leaders. we have a legacy to fulfil. it is time for all of us to get to work. put an end to empty promises in the bends. -- in advance. >> the census process. a discussion of the economic status of women in america. a house hearing on the effectiveness of programs to identify terrorists. >> as a host and trader, you're not necessarily republican or democrat. you are booking at the impact of what government is doing of the financial markets, or trading, or wall street. >> cnbc postal money acre on her career and influences. what she believes her role is in

reporting financial news. what's the rest of the interview sunday night at 8:00 on q &a. >> robert gross told a senate home and subcommittee that the census bureau is testing internet based questionnaires for the 2020 census. he told them that using the internet is one of the measures that they are looking at to cut costs. last year's said this -- senses these pen and paper. that cost $98 per person. the hearing is just over two hours.

>> the hearing will come to order. thank you for joining us. i will make a brief statement and turn it over to general pat -- brown. we will get the show on the road. we will examine lessons learned from the 2010 census while identifying initiatives that show promise for producing an even more accurate and cost-

effective since this in 2020. i want to begin by congratulating doctor murdock who was our senses director. they are career professionals that did an excellent job in carrying out the 2010 census. as a result of their hard work, there were a number of organizational >> despite these achievements, the 2010 census was the most expensive in our nation's history by far, even taking

inflation into account, the total colings of the operations escalated from initial estimationed of $11.3 billion to close to $13 billion. more disturbing is with all the modern scientific advancements over the year, the framework for conducting the 2010 census was based on a model used in the 1970's. although the basics of the census remain the same over the past 40 years, the cost decidedly has not. the cost per household was $98 in 2010, compared to $70 in 2000. the census could rise as much as to $30 billion if we continue on this track. that is not acceptable anymore

than budget deficits of $1.5 trillion are not acceptable. it is not acceptable as a time when we are struggling to find solutions to the debt crisis our country is currently facing. we speak at previous hearings about the need for us to look in every nook and c-spanny of the federal government, domestic, defense, entitlement spending along with tax expenditures and ask is this question. is it possible to get better results for less money. the hard truth is that many programs' funding levels will be reduced. they need to be reduced. even some of the most popular and worthwhile programs out there will likely be asked to do more with less, or at least to do more without a whole lot more money. the census bureau, despite the constitutionally mandated nature of its work cannot be immune. while most americans want us to reduce the deficit, determining

the best path forward will not be easy. many of us believe those of us sent here to washington are not wake-upable of making the hard decisions we were hired to do and effectively managing the tax dollars they have trusted us with. they look at your 0 decisions made in recent years and question whether the culture here is broken. they question whether we are capable of the the kinds of tough decisions their family has to make. the skepticism proved to be well founded when you look at the kind of avoidable management failures that escalated costs in the 2010 census. although it is nine years away, it is never too early to start thinking about ways to reduce costs and improvement quality through more efficient data collection. more importantly, we need to make certain that the issues that lead to failures and cost

overruns we saw in recent years have been addressed and will not reoccur. taxpayers should not be expected to pick up the tab for them again. looking ahead, the bureau's research should focus on how existing technology can be incorporated to the 2020 design. obviously the internet is here to stay, or at least probably for my life time and according to the experts in internet response option, it could have saved the bureau tens of millions of dollars in processing costs in 2010. future research should focus not only how to collect the data but how to reap the benefit of it and other technologies the next time around. we need to also make certain that the people who make up our growing and changing country are secure enough with the data collection methods we use to allow for an accurate census. we want to reverse a trend of censuses marked by poor

planning and escalating costs. >> i plan to sfwrow legislation this year that would, manage other things, make the director of the census bureau a presidential term appointment of five years. a fixed term would help to avoid leadership gaps during critical planning stages and facilitate the longer term planning so vital to censuses. we introduced legislation last year to establish a term appointment for the director and to make a number of other changes aimed at preventing serious problems in the future. it passed the senate unanimously, but failed to be taken up in the house. i would like to work with you, doctor, if we can, to make whatever changes are necessary

to put together something that addresses the lessons learned from 2010 and can then enjoy bipartisan support as our proposal did in the last congress. we look forward to hearing from our witnesses today who will help us to identify ways to best balance the need for an accurate census with the need to ensure a reasonable cost for this endeavor. senator brown, 10 years from today i suspect you will still be here, but i'm not sure that i will be. i might be, but i wouldn't want to bet on that. whoever sits in these seats, i don't want them to say how did we end up spending twice and much for the census in 2020, leading up to 2020 as we spent in 2010. how did we do that? that is what we did from 2000 to 2010, and we have done it again. i don't want the folks on this committee to go through that. i don't want the senate to go through that. i don't want the people of our

country to go through that. i know the ground work is being laid this year to make sure history doesn't repeat itself. we are anxious to learn how we can help that we end up nine nears from now with a better count, a more accurate census, and we have done it not for twice as much money, but maybe if we are smart, the same amount of money. scott? >> thank you, mr. chairman. i am bouncing back and force in hearings. i will only be able to stay for the first panel. sir, it is good to see you again. as required by our constitution, our country has conducted a census every year since 1790. it is a vital undertaking, the results are used to apportion seats in the house and used in the dribution of more than $400 billion in federal and state funds. while we must strive to ensure every person is counted, we can't afford to have the out of control spending that seems to

be going on and getting worse continue. the cost of each housing unit has escalated from around $16 in 1970 to $98 in 2010. i have learned we can't simply continue to do the things the way we have always done them. we need to think outside the box. i know we used to have records. i would tell my kids and younger people that i used to listen to records. they look at me like i have three heads. you know what i am talking about, what a record is. but you look around, and you see how we do stuff in the federal government, and i feel i am i am back in the 1970's talking about the records. whether it is the arlington national cemetery and keeping our fallen heroes on index cards. i just don't get it. with the amount of money that we spend on these, things, we have to find a way to do it

better to get a better bank for our -- bang for our buck. the basic census model has not changed. we need to streamline, consolidate, do it better. we are relying on the old school way of doing things, and i don't think it is working just based on the costs we are seeing and we will be talking about. with an array of internet-based technologies. you have facebook, twitter, e.m., i.m.'s, the whole range of ways that we can do it better. i am hoping that we can kind of, with your lerm, sir, as we talked about, do it better. with a world leader in inventing, and commercializing technologies and innovation, and being from massachusetts and cambridge in particular, it is where it all begins. it is where many of the think

tanks are in our great country. yet it seems we are lacking behind. i am convinced we can break this cycle and do it better and be more cost effective, and i am excited to have that opportunity to discuss that with you. while i expect the census bureau to say the right things about reforming the process in 2020, i have been here long enough to know that the taxpayers and congress have the right to remain skeptical based on past performance, not necessarily from this organization, but based on other things. we are going to try to find a way to bring it out and offer solutions or sessions, find out how we can help through legislative or making or eliminating regulation, finding

you out how our tax dollar can be spent better. thank you, mr. chairman, for holding this hearing. >> i am glad we could do it together. i am going to introduce our panel. i think you have all been here before, maybe a couple of times. good thing we are not paid on a per appearance basis. let me welcome dr. groves, nominated by president obama to be director of the census and confirmed by the senate last july. he is an expert in survey methodology and researched ways of improving the system through staffing and programs and keep it committed to the highest scientific principles of accuracy. he knows how the agency operates, what its employees need to successfully implement the census. thank to see you.

the honorable todd sensor. every now and again we get phone calls at home from people, and we have one of these do not call lists, and still we get calls. if they are calling from like the university of michigan or ohio state. one day i got this call from a fellow, and they said is han there? i said pardon me? he said is han there? i was trying to think. who could he be calling for? then i was thinking, hon, period, short for honorable. so i said this is hon. [laughter] >> oh, hon, how are you doing? i forget where he was calling from. you have been great to support or charity before. i just want to see if you could do it again. so he made his pitch, and i said hon have no money. he gives me about another 30

seconds, and i said more strongly hon have no money. he came back a third time. i said hon have no money, call hon calf -- honor castle. he has the money. he never called back. but hon todd zinser, welcome. todd serves as the inspector general for the u.s. department of commerce. he leads a team of auditors, investigators, attorneys and administrative staff responsible for detecting and preventing fraud, waste and abuse in a vast array of business, sign timbings and environmental programs administered through the department of commerce. he holds a bachelor's degree in political city in northern kentucky and a master's degree from miami university.

is that the home of the bob cats? >> yes. >> we were buckeyes of ohio state. robert is the director of strategic issues at the government accountability office where he was responsible for reviewing the 2010 census and government-wide human capital reforms. he has also performed research on issues involving transportation security, human trafficking and federal statistical programs. he received his bachelor and masters in public administration from the george washington university. your statements will be made part of the record. once you have concluded, i will ask senator brown to ask the first questions. i will be listening intently to the questions and answers. doctor, great to see you. thank you for taking on this job. you are recognized. if you go a whole lot over five

minutes, i will have to reign you in. keeping that in mind. thank you so much. please proceed. >> mr. chairman, ranking member brown, i am happy to be here, and thank you for the invitation. although the census bureau has a formal program of valuations on the 2010, those aren't yet complete, but i do have information i can share on preliminary quality indicators. my testimony in written form is really in three pieces. valuation of thes -- the nuss, or organizational change at the census bureau and lessons learned. i am going to concentrate on the third part. i can note that the preliminary findings on the quality of the 2010 census are positive in the majority and show improvements over the 2000 effort. i would be happy to expand on that. i want the committee to know that we have always been engaged in a variety of

organizational change initiatives that we care deeply about. we have basically concluded that our business model of collecting social and economic data faces severe challenges over the long run. we know we must innovate in order to remain useful and relevant to the country. further, we know that this innovation is not likely to be funded by added resources. we must become more efficient and fund innovations from cost-saving measures, and that is what these programs are about. i want to mention three specifically. first, we have mounted a program that is seeking proposals from throughout all the employee groups for cost efficiencies. it was hardwarming to see last year that we received over 650 proposals from folks throughout the census bureau on how to make what they do more efficient, and we are pursuing a lot of the good ideas and

saving money already. second, we have partnered with our federal agencies who sponsor surveys that we collect data for in order to find out ways we can save money for them. this will have ripple effects to other agencies. third, we are vigorously trying to tear down the boundaries among the silos of the census bureaus. let me rattle off a few. we have instituted a corporate hiring program for new staticticians to make sure they move across the organization and spreading innovation across the silos. we are moving across architecture solutions on the i.t. front. this means a greater emphasis on the internet and cloud computing, a consolidation of data storage systems that is already saving money. we have built a technology innovation center to do quick

prototyping of new solutions. we have greatly expanded our interpret data collection, soon to cover 60 of our sample surveys, alogan approximately 900,000 respondents the opportunity to respond online. increasingly people are using the internet options we are providing on hand-held devices like i-phones, droids and i pads. these changes together in my belief well make us a more unified, integrated organization, one that is ready to mount a successful 2020 census. that is what i want to turn to now. i want to go through eight loss ons that i have learned personally, each of which has generated a principle for the organization of the development plans for 2020. lesson one, the multi-decade cost increase of the census must be halted. we are attempting to design a 2020 census that costs lest per

housing unit than the 2010 census while maintaining the quality of the results. lesson two, the traditional non-response follow up procedures we have used over past decades are inefficient and costly. we want to make the census convenient to diverse groups using multiple modes of data collection. this means the traditional mail, but also phone, multiple internet options, face to face and other options as they emerge. three, we need end to end tests of production systems ideally within real survey production environments. lesson four, too few of the system and development and procedure developments of the 2010 census were designed to benefit the entire institution. thus the fourth principle is that we want to develop systems within the survey production environments of the census bureau. we plan to use the american

community survey as a chief test bed for the 2020 census system's development. let me skip to lesson six. we have concluded that a small number of large test censuses create intolerable risks for the census bureau. we want to do many small tests. we feel the evidence of updating the master address list, that partial updating in the last decade was successful. we want to build on that success. let me sum up. overall, we know of no single method of collecting census data that is optimal for all the diverse subpopulations of the u.s. some residents have told us they don't want people visiting their home. some residents told us that information they have already provided in other government forms ought to be used. some residents want to use the internet at any time of the day on any device they favor to fit

their lifestyle. and someone to speak by telephone by someone who understands their language and subculture. we hope to reduce the size and expense of the field follow up activities. this is the most important and expensive part of the daily collection. we are concentrating our efforts there to achieve a quality census. those are my oral remarks. i would be happy to answer questions. >> thanks for the orally marks. please proceed? >> thank you, mr. chairman and ranking member brown. thank you for inviting us to testimony today -- to testify day. the 2010 census was an enormous under taking with a current cost estimate of near through $13 billion. it required more than a decade of planning, testing, and implementing dozens of operations and hundreds of

thousands of employees to accomplish. my testimony today is based on oversight we provided to both the planning and execution of the census. we sent over 100 o.i.g. staff to every state and the district of columbia. we provideded feedback on stake holder activities and from the field in reports, testimony and in real time communications back to the census bureau. while the census has successfully completed thits 2010 operations, this carried with it a high level of cost and risk that should not be repeated. g.a.o. estimated that the current design model could mean a 2020 cost of $30 billion. to achieve a quality count with greater cost containment, the census must change the design implementation and management of the census, and it must start to do so now. my testimony today covers seven

challenges for the census bureau to address for the 2020 census. first, census must revamp their vost estimation and budget processes to increase accuracy, flexibility and transparency. second, census should use the internet and administrative records to improve accuracy. there are already numerous federal agencies that collect similar information about u.s. households at significant duplicated costs. use of existing records could greatly assist census in reducing the cost of many of its operations. it is a complex issue, but not insurmountable. and a slid interest to use the internet for 2020 is imperative. 2010 site tests were scheduled at two-year intervals. each one transpired over three years of planning, implementation and evaluation. the tests overlapped, which made it difficult to apply the

results from one test to the next. census now plans to conduct a larger number of smaller tests and align research with the testing program. census should effectively automate field data collection. they tried to maximize the use of automation for the 2010 census, but fell short. costs and risk increased. census must show up i.t. process early in the decade to prepare for implementing automated data check. we recommend they avoid a massive field operation through continued updating of address lists and maps. the initial operation cost $444 million and experienced a 25% cost roifer run. census is planning to update lists and maps throughout the decade and is kfing other options to meet address and map requirements.

sixth, the bureau should implement improved project planning and management techniques early in the decade. for the 2010 census tracked more than 9,000 activities over several years for 44 different operations. we have made recommendations aimed at strengthening project and risk management. finally, a census bureau director position should be established to span administrations. for the life cycle of the 2010 census, we counted six directors and acting directors. census would benefit from greater leadership continuity. census has already embarked on its place. however, it will need continued focus, engagement and resourced throughout the decade to help ensure that the 2020 census fulfills the promise of better technology, methods and operations. that concludes my summary, mr. chairman. i would be happy to answer any questions you may have. >> as an early pitch, dr., when

the questions come to me, one of the questions is to walk through that list of seven recommendations. i want you to be prepared to comment on those, please. please proceed. >> mr. chairman, ranking member brown, i would like to thank you for the opportunity to be here today to discuss lessons learned from the 2010 census and initiatives that shall promise for delivering a more effect effective numeration. it was a success and the bureau completed its peak collection activities consistent with plans and used the data to reapportion and redistrict congress several days ahead of legally mandated deadlines. nevertheless, the bureau had to overcome a series of hurdles that jeopardized a complete count. first, internal issues, including long-standing weaknesses in the i.t. procedures led us to add the

2010 census to the list of g.a.o.'s high risk programs. external societal trend such as diverse population have made a cost effective head count difficult. much like going up a down escalator, the bureau has been investing substantially more resources each decade in order to secure a complete count. for example, as ranking member brown noted, in constant 2010 dollars, the cost of enumerating each household haas escalated from around $16 in 1970 to around $98 in 2010. this trend is unsustainable. the 2010 census with a cost of around $13 billion was the most expensive head count in our nation's history. simply put, the singular challenge facing the bureau is how to control the cost of the 2020 census while maintaining its accuracy. in this regard, my remarks today will focus on four key

lessons learned from 2010 that would be important for the bureau to address as it continues its planning efforts for 2020. the first lesson learned is the importance of fundamentally reexamining the nation's approach to taking the census. this is critical because simply refining current methods, some of which have been in place for decades, will not bring about the reforms needed to obtain acceptable results given ongoing and newly emerging societal trends. a fundamental reexamination means rethinking the bureau's approach to planning, it testing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating the census. colluding making better use of administrative records such as driver's licenses as well as social media. the second lesson learned is the importance of tailoring key census information to population grooms. the bureau plans to complete over 70 studies of the 2010 census. as this research is completed,

it will be critical for the bureau to assess the cost and benefits of each operation so it can allocate resources more efficiently in 2020. the third lesson learned centers on institution alizing efforts on those areas that made the 2010 census a high risk area. this includes incorporating best practices for i.t. acquisition management, developing more reliable cost estimates and ensuring key operations are fully tested under operational conditions. the fourth lesson learned involves ensuring that the bureau's organizational culture, structure tour as well as approach to strategic planning, human capital management and other internal functions are in line with producing more exost effective outcomes. these actions are needed because of some of the operational problems that occurred were system attic of deeper organizational issues such as inadequate human capital planning. importantly, the bureas